LaEscopeta
Member
OK I’m going to throw more confusion into the mix. What you want is…A .357 LEVER CARBINE!currently have a 357 mag k frame revolver and i love it
Yes, terminal ballistics, rate of fire, ammo capacity, range, and maybe accuracy are all inferior to a Saiga rifle. And .357 will generally over penetrate more than .223. But .357 from a carbine has more range and hits harder than a 9 mm carbine. And you already have .357 ammo. To save a few bucks you can plink with both your revolver and your new carbine with .38 special ammo.
For most real home defense situations a .357 lever rifle will be good enough. For any sort of SHTF outside-the-house fantasy scenarios the Saiga advantages blow any pistol carbine away. But as Correia says in post 27 above, “what is your mission? You need to define what you are looking for.”
The over penetration issue can be broken into 2 parts:
- A round hitting the target (the bad guy) and continuing through to hit something else you don’t want hit (I understand this is the original FBI definition of the term “over penetration.”)
- A round missing the target, going through wall(s) and hitting something you don’t want hit.
You can limit the first possible with expanding (hollow points, etc), fragmenting, or tumbling (yawing) bullets. All three quickly decrease the kinetic energy of the bullet in the target, limiting the chances of an exit, and limiting possible damage to a second target if the bullet does exit. All three also increase (or at least don’t decrease) the round’s stopping powder. Reduced energy rounds (.38 special, 22LR, etc) also limit over penetration, but they also reduce stopping powder, and these decreases are pretty much proportional to each other.
You can limit the second type of over penetration danger by first and formost doing everything you can to increase your odds of hitting the target. A search for “home defense” on this site will yields lots of ways to do this (plan what to do, set up a safe room with everyone in the house behind you, and a “fatal funnel” through which any intruder will have to pass to get to you, etc.) The other thing you need to do to increase hit probability is practice. And since you said you can practice easier, cheaper and more often at the near by pistol range, I think that settles your choice. Get a .357 lever.
(.223 bullets, due to their tendency to tumble and quickly lose energy after hitting anything, even a sheet rock wall, probably have the greatest ratio of stopping power to minimum miss danger. A tumbling .223 round will still go hundreds of yards down range, even with a dozen or so walls in between, but it will generally do less damage to a person after going through the first wall, compared to other rounds. This is the finding of the oft quoted FBI study, and one reason many LE organizations have switched to .223 rifles.)
(I’m not repeating the usual arguments that a shotgun is the best home defense weapon because I assume the original poster has heard them and has already decided they want a rifle/carbine.)